Have been trying to work in super-drive, am currently working on the beach, post post-apocalypse print. last week I printed a better version on the single colour central print of three. I printed it in darker in, and also I adjusted the bitmap for more contrast so that the stencil would blow out more evenly. I’m feeling the groove of screen printing again, the first time I’d been back this term I felt a bit shaking and stressed out down there. this printing day was a lot more relaxed. I’ve decided to shift away from the single color print of this piece to a 4 colour process, as I’ve used before. i figured out how to use the filter colour halftone (which creates a more chunky and indistinct print) in a four colour process way. below is a sample of what it should look like printed best on a Photoshop rendering. this is the first (furthest left) image of the three.

beach, post post-apocalypse

(detail)

I’ve also been hammering away at what is going on with my sculptures, and how to integrate them and what material I should use- which is all a very discovery based mess! last week i created a rat figure out of chicken wire, paper mache, rabbit skin glue + plaster, and acrylic paint. I’m pretty happy with how this looks, but not sure how to implement this with the prints, and how this will look all together… so I’m sitting on this process for a bit and exploring some other options.

last week Kenny showed me the work of Francis Upritchard who works in FIMO clay and a variety of other media. we talked about my potentially working in FIMO and also about objectify-ing art and how much I wanted to do that sort of thing… also discussed a surface that smaller work could exist on, and how I wanted to handle that… Kenny also recommended that I read Gunter Grass’s The Rat which is a fiction book he thought I’d be interested in.

Did some research this weekend and was looking at cold porcelain process. I like that it’s a make-it-yourself process, which would work well with needing large quantities, budget-wise. in addition, it has a bit more delicate look than FIMO.

I’ve been thinking about returning to the museum cases, only focusing on the idea of the specimen escaping a space in which it has become objectified, so instead of sealing the sculptures in, having them escaping through broken glass. Also thinking about more contemporary looking museum cases and displays in which to put aforementioned action in contemporary context.

so that’s what’s on right now, I’m working in printmaking this week on the above print and also making cold porcelain this afternoon to begin experimenting with.

I’ve had a lot of progression over the last two weeks. Since meeting Kenny I’ve been building up plaster on the mosquito armature I made over the summer. Since I made it this summer though, when I didn’t have access to the wood or metal shop, the armature is quite weak, and bends when the mosquito stands on its own slightly. So it’s become a bit of a disaster. I’ve decided not to invest any more time into it just now, as I need to restart using a better armature and I may potentially switch materials.

I originally chose plaster because it could look more refined and smooth than paper mache. However, it is extremely tedious sculpting the plaster and building it up and due to the shapes I’m wanting to create you have to use multiple layers and this makes the legs weaker… you can only add so much plaster at once to a vertical plane… anyway. I also chose plaster because I feel due to the environmental content of my work that using resin or foam would be wrong. Yesterday I spoke with Konomi, and she showed me a book that used a processes of coating paper mache in natural glue and then sanding and rubbing with an embossing tool. The end result was very smooth and uniform texture, with no sign of the layers of paper it was made from.
Another possibility is paper casting, which Konomi told me about also. We have planned to try making casting paper on Monday. This could be smoothed over the surface of paper mache or clay (or generally anything) to make an irregular paper-like surface.
I think either of these could be an interesting tactic, and I’m going to explore them in the following week.

Today I went to printmaking and pulled to prints of the center section of the beach crap (informal title) print. Since I put this on the internet last, I’ve decided to break the image from a 4-colour screen-print into a single grayscale halftone layer. I think that doing this unifies the image contents. In addition this creates confusion as you approach the print in close up, so the viewer must stand far away from the print to see the contents of the image. I really am happy with this as it is so important in discussing the confused future of our environment that we have a broad perspective of the issues at hand. I am very pleased with the scale of these prints.

This evening I did a test to watercolour one of the prints. I’m interested in adding a colour element that seems in progress, or unfinished somehow… I was happy with how this layer looked, but I did not like how the colour disrupted the surface bitmap pattern of the print. I am going to try to find a way to place the watercolour element underneath the halftone print, and potentially through printmaking creating a watercolour-ed “look” instead of actual watercolour. I was discussing this with Ailsa and she showed me the website of Catherine Rayner, who has an aesthetic similar to what I had described.
In the following week my plan is to project the halftone print image on the existing print I have made, to match the size and pattern. I will then remove the existing print, while leaving the projector registered to where the print was, and fill in the watercolour details as I would want to print them below the halftone layer. This way the more spontaneous watercolour can later be broken down and manipulated into a screen-printing layer.

So I have a lot to work on. In addition for my pecha kucha I’ve decided to present on narrative (art writing) in visual culture, which is Week 8 of Visual Cultures. I am attracted to this topic as I’ve recently been looking at the work of Charles Avery, and how his story of his imagined world relates and unifies his prints and sculptures. It is also important to mention that as Charles Avery works from a purely fictional narrative, my narrative would be rooted more in science fiction, I would discuss our world as it could or would be from an omniscient point of view, vague as to if the narrator has been recorded and is deceased or is currently living. I think that this form of writing could unify my work as it does Charles Avery’s, and this process feeds well from last year’s Case Study. Instead of a textual form of art writing I am interested in spoken narrative. In the following week I’m going to begin reading the texts for Week 8 seminar.